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tion) be dispatched in one; and that the same noble army might not be abused by an absurd and insignificant way of surveying, then carrying on by Mr. Worsley." And again, "I thought that, besides the ordinary reward agreed me, I should have received monumental thanks; not considering that too great merit is more often paid with envy than with condign rewards." And that, "by attempting new difficulties, to have stretched my own capacities and intellect; the which (like leather on a last) is not only formed and fashioned, but much extended by such employments." And, "I hoped hereby to enlarge my trade of experiments from bodies to minds, from the motions of the one to the manners of the other; thereby to have understood passions as well as fermentations, and consequently to have been as pleasant a companion to my ingenious friends as if such an intermission from physic had never been; for you see, Sir, how by this means I have gotten the occasion of practising upon my own morals, that is, to learn how, with silence and smiles, to elude the sharpest provocations, and without troublesome menstruums to digest the roughest injuries that ever a poor man was crammed with."
In the first page of our history he shows, that he was far from inactive in the duties of his professional office (which in his will he states that he continued to hold till June, 1659); that he was able to introduce valuable economic reforms into that department, and to follow also the private practice of his profession, for which he states in the Reflections that he "forbore to take fees, for fear they might be intended to bias my actings in my other trusts and capacities."
In this account of Dr. Petty's first connexion with the survey, it is not necessary to follow the acrimony with which he comments upon the undertakings or performances of his predecessors; but the faults to which he adverts, and which he proposed to remedy, were, that the payment was excessive, that there was no mode of examining the work, and no security for its correctness.
If, as would appear by the context and by what follows, the survey consisted merely in measuring the outline and giving the content of the several estates which were returned by the civil survey as forfeited, and that the payment was made in proportion to the area, while only the perimeter was measured, it is obvious the payment would increase in a much higher ratio than the labour, and the greater the necessity for examination and test, the more difficult they would become. It would also appear, that the survey of unprofitable land, not being required by the Act, was not paid for. This, doubtless, exposed the surveyors to the temptation of increasing their estimate of the quantity of profitable land. It will be seen that Dr. Petty was paid also by content, i. e. per 1000 acres, and that, though he was paid for the unprofitable land also, it was at a lower rate. This would present the same temptation in a smaller degree, but the different nature of the survey, and of his payments to his surveyors, will be seen to afford a sufficient preventive. The delivery to the claimants of their land by mere estimated subdivisions, would have been uncertain and unsatisfactory, and there can be no doubt that a survey made according to these intentions, would have been very imperfect, even for its own purposes, and, containing no topographical information of a general nature, would have been useless as a map.
